or this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; th...

I have been a bit negative about memes, but they have their cheerful side
as well. When we die there are two things we can leave behind us: genes
and memes. We were built as gene machines, created to pass on our
genes. But that aspect of us will be forgotten in three generations. Your
child, even your grandchild, may bear a resemblance to you, perhaps in
facial features, in a talent for music, in the colour of her hair. But as
each generation passes, the contribution of your genes is halved. ...

Our genes will only last in recognizable form for three generations or so, being halved with each generation; our memes, however, have the potential to live far beyond our lifetimes and have greater influence.

When you say exergasia, synathroesmus, and incrementum together in a list, it seems to me that you have thereby given an example of all three devices in that same phrase.”
Swan snorted at this. “How so, Socrates?”
“ ‘Exergasia’ means ‘use of different phrases to express the same idea,’ ‘synathroesmus’ means ‘accumulation by enumeration,’ and ‘incrementum’ means ‘piling up points to make an argument.’ So listing them does all three, yes?”
“And what argume...

Take water. It's simple, common, and vital. There are more molecules of water in an eight-ounce cup of the stuff than there are cups of water in all the world's oceans. Every cup that passes through a single person and eventually rejoins the world's water supply holds enough molecules to mix fifteen hundred of them into every other cup of water in the world. No way around it: some of the water you just drank passed through the kidneys of Socrates, Genghis Khan, and Joan of Arc.
How about ai...

Kids need to know that nonconformity requires courage. There are plenty of nonconformists to draw upon as examples, secular and religious people alike, from Socrates to Martin Luther King to Michael Newdow—people whose strength of conviction led them to face with dignity and courage the consequences of stepping outside of the norm in the name of heartfelt principles. It isn’t easy, but doing what’s right can be well worth it.
The second reason is even more daunting. As noted above, rel...

The young specialist in English Lit, having quoted me, went on to lecture me severely on the fact that in every century people have thought they understood the Universe at last, and in every century they were proved to be wrong. It follows that the one thing we can say about our modern 'knowledge' is that it is wrong.
The young man then quoted with approval what Socrates had said on learning that the Delphic oracle had proclaimed him the wisest man in Greece. 'If I am the wisest man,' said S...

The passage shows how different aspects of
virtue connect. Patience is part intellectual virtue, part
moral virtue and part physical virtue, as it is portrayed
here. The humility which allows Leopold to lie down
in the muck unselfconsciously is a moral virtue, but
humble recognition of our own ignorance is also a key
intellectual virtue, as Socrates so often reminds us
(see also William Beebe’s description of the ideal
naturalist quoted earlier). Humility also makes
possible Leopold’s aes...

Even when it's applied sensitively,
scientific scepticism may come across as arrogant, dogmatic,
heartless and dismissive of the feelings and deeply held beliefs of
others. And, it must be said, some scientists and dedicated
sceptics apply this tool as a blunt instrument, with little finesse.
Sometimes it looks as if the sceptical conclusion came first, that
contentions were dismissed before, not after, the evidence was
examined. All of us cherish our beliefs. They are, to a degree,
self-defi...